Tech Has a Jargon Problem, and SMEs Are Paying for It
Here is our pet peeve: the technology industry speaks a language designed to impress other technology people, and Singapore's SMEs are quietly paying the bill. "Leverage an AI-powered cloud-native platform to unlock synergies across your digital transformation journey." Nobody who runs a real business talks like this. Yet this is how tools are sold to the people who fix the pipes, run the kitchens and build the country.
Jargon is not harmless
When a pitch cannot be understood, a business owner has three options: pay someone to translate it, buy on blind faith, or walk away. All three cost money. The quiet tragedy is the fourth outcome: owners who conclude that technology itself is not for people like them, and stay with the whiteboard for another decade. Then the same industry publishes reports asking why SME digitalisation is slow.
A disrespect the wrong way round
What makes this genuinely irritating is who is being talked down to. As we argued in how Singapore keeps punching above its weight, SMEs employ most of this country's workforce and are a large part of why it survived every shock thrown at it. These are not people who fail to understand complexity; they manage manpower, cashflow, regulation and customers before lunch. They fail to understand vagueness, and so should everyone.
The plain-language test
Any tool worth buying can be described in words a busy owner understands. Ours: we set up a video and quiz platform for training your staff. It runs on an old computer in your office that we turn into a server, so your data stays with you and nothing goes to the cloud. Videos can be in your workers' languages. You see who has watched what and who passed. One-time setup, S$5,000.
- What does it do? Answered.
- What does it cost, in total? Answered.
- Where does my data live? Answered.
- No synergies were leveraged.
Hold vendors to that bar. A vendor who cannot explain their product without jargon is telling you something important about how the support calls will go.
Train your team the way people actually learn. Our Learning Management System turns your onboarding and training into short videos with quizzes, localised into the languages your workers speak, running on a server in your own office. One-time setup at S$5,000. Reach out at admin@holdtheholding.com.